I’ve been wanting to get involved in the Royal Foodie Joust* (see the Foodie Blogroll thing on the right) for awhile but before this month either the ingredients were too precious for me to play around with or I just didn’t have the time. 
And I almost didn’t have the time this month – I forgot about it until 2 weeks ago, but we were busy preparing for a family trip, and then when we returned we were so busy catching back up on work that the week just flew past – but it kept floating around in the back of my mind, so I decided to try anyway, even if I couldn’t actually enter the contest. Luckily for me, the deadline was extended a few days, so today I gathered up my ingredients and all of the random possibilities that had been parading through my mind. The result totally surprised me! Read the rest of this entry »
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Cherry Pie
Once again, it has been awhile since I have baked anything. Since I will be starting grad school at the end of August, you might as well get used to it. *sigh*
But I was commissioned to bake dessert for tomorrow’s Father’s Day celebration, so I finally had a chance to try something I have been wanting to do for a couple of weeks: a cherry pie. Read the rest of this entry »
Herbed Baked Potatoes
Before sitting down to our crappy reality shows and usual tape cover-folding, we had to have dinner. 
Speaking of staples, potatoes are one of ours (sour cream too!).
Normally, baked potatoes aren’t experi-mental in our home, but I noticed some leftover fresh sage while getting our other usual additions out of the refrigerator and decided to add it to my potato.
Mid-Week Tex-Mex Veggie Quesadillas
When you work three jobs and/or are a student and want to eat food that won’t drive you to a triple bypass by the time you’re 40, 
like Brad and I have been for the past 3 years, you have to learn to come up with fast, nutritious meals. Savory baking is awesome for people like us because all you really have to do is a few preparations to get it together, stick it in the oven, and come back to check on it. In the meantime, you can write emails and essays and blogposts, take a break long enough to play a few songs on Guitar Hero, shower, or any of the other millions of little things that prevent you from standing at the stove keeping your fried-whatever from burning.
Old-Fashioned Coffee Cake
Recently, while reading Vintage Cookbooks, I decided to pull out one of my old cookbooks. Since I’ve been going through a phase of wanting to throw every excess thing away (especially books) in preparation for my potential return to university, I figured I should try baking something from it to see if it was worth keeping.
I have two old cookbooks: one is from the very early 1900s but it’s in storage;
The book with the original recipe
Plain White Yeast Bread: The Best First Bread
This is definitely the first bread that a person new to bread should try. It’s very simple, very forgiving, and very tasty. It’s not as intimidating as other breads, either. The long recipe, amount of time, and all the steps might seem a little scary, but they are actually pretty easy.
I don’t know what made me decide to try making bread from scratch the first time a few years ago. Honestly, I’m pretty sure it was boredom and a desire for something new. I don’t remember what kind I made, either – I never thought that one loaf would lead me into the fascinating wilds of all kinds of baked goods. It certainly should have been a plain white but knowing myself as I do, it was probably one of the most complicated ones in the book.
But I loved making bread that first time, even though my attempts weren’t all that pretty, so I kept doing it when I had the chance. The silky flour in my hands, the rewarding ache of my muscles, and especially the warm smell and unmatchable taste of fresh-baked bread drove me to it.
Homemade Baked French Fries
The sleet is falling, the roads are icy, our thermostat is at a chilly 70 degrees to keep the electric bill from ballooning, and Brad and I needed some comfort food to keep us warm. So we had chicken nuggets (real ones from Whole Foods) and french fries.
A few years ago, when we realized how horribly fattening most restaurant food is – especially our favorite, chicken nuggets and deep-fried french fries – we thought we could never have french fries again. We found some baked ones in bags at Whole Foods but with the $6 chicken nuggets and a $4 bag of french fries, it was one expensive meal.
I’m cheating a little here again, but this recipe started as an experiment to see if we could make the meal cheaper without making ourselves fatter. It became a fixture, something that I make at least once a week.
Apple Pie Math Muffins
Last night, Brad and I went over to his sister’s house so that his brother-in-law could help me with some of the math I’ve been studying for the GRE. We were a little worried about inviting ourselves but his sister told his mom (his mom is the only one who openly shows emotion on a regular basis so she’s always the middleperson) that she hoped we wouldn’t stop coming over after I was done with the GRE.
One of the things I’m really terrible at is fractions, which may sound kind of ridiculous coming from someone who loves to bake. And there is a certain comfort in fractions – they make more sense to my visual brain than decimals. It’s just the crazy things they do to each other in mathematic equations that confuse me, because I want them to stand on their own.
So I’ve been concentrating on one of my shortcuts in an effort to get myself used to playing with fractions, a shortcut that I wanted to share with you.
Pumpkin (Muffin) Donuts
This was originally posted on my other blog, What If. I’m moving it – and all of my baking posts – here in the next few weeks.
ManPants and I are a little obsessed with baked items made with pumpkin. It’s not the reason we love fall so much, but it is definitely high on the list.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a recipe for pumpkin donuts. Fortunately, this meant my first true experiment – attempting to combine my pumpkin muffins with a pumpkin-less donut recipe.
Experiments in Pizza Dough
This was originally posted on my other blog, What If. I’m moving it – and all of my baking posts – here in the next few weeks.
One of the things that I find so wonderful about baking is that I get to have tasty treats without paying huge amounts of money. It really started about two years ago, when ManPants and I researched a bunch of fast food restaurants (which is almost all of the restaurants around here) and realized that eating at them almost every day was not only hard on our bank account but not healthy in the slightest. Consuming more than a day’s recommended serving of fat in one meal was more rip-off than convenience. So we decided to cook a lot more often and I started to bake bread.
I didn’t attempt pizza dough until I’d learned a lot about break-baking, but pizza dough is in some ways far more forgiving.
